Soft Cleaning of Wire-Immobilized Genetic Material

The MinIONtrade; instrument developed by Oxford Nanopore is the gold standard in portable genetic sequencing. Experts in a very many technical areas are energized about the possibility of bringing DNA and RNA sequencing from the full-service laboratory to the field. Painfully, though, the MinION is only half of the solution; field sequencing is still unfeasible. The preparation of such a genetic sample (referred to as the DNA Library), remains an intensely manual process needing a trained wet lab technician and several pieces of laboratory equipment. To achieve the elegant automation of this DNA Library preparation from a raw sample, we must first abandon the standard conventions for handling and manipulating the biological and biochemical constituents. Any other solution will possess an inefficiency and unmanageable complexity that is unsuited to the size, weight, and power (SWaP) budget of any NASA mission . In Phase I nou Systems Inc. (nSI) has demonstrated such a transformative approach. We have threaded together several cross-enabling innovations to create an instrument, nSI Xpres, that can fully automate the DNA Library prep process. Since low-biomass sequencing is our goal, we have based our protocol around the PCR-based preparation chemistry that is conventionally associated with the 16S Barcoding Kit sold commercially by Oxford Nanopore. Innovation 1 : Soft Cleaning of Wire-Immobilized Genetic material (SCWiG)nbsp; Innovation 2: nbsp; Zero-Volume Microfluidic Regions (ZVRs) nbsp; Innovation 3: Innovation: Thermal Gradient Heating/Cooling At the completion of this Phase II effort, nSI will deliver a prototype of nSI Xpres to NASA and will provide up to two days of in-person training at NASA JSC for up to six persons.